Page 20 of Warrior Queen

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I shook my head again, inspiration arriving in the nick of time. “I’m just sad she won’t always be a baby, cuddled in my arms.” I peeked up at his face. “One day she’ll be all grown up and off to marry someone far away, and I might never see her again.”

He smiled with a touch of indulgence for a silly emotional woman. “That time’s far away. She’ll be ours for a long time yet.” He removed his arm and got out of bed. “Here, give her to me. You’re exhausted. I’ll take her back to Maia, and you can lie down and get some sleep.”

Considering he was naked, I thought that might give Maia a bit of a shock. Despite my tears, a smile twitched my lips. “You’d better put something on then.”

He chuckled. “Can’t have her screaming if she finds a naked man in her room.” He pulled on the braccae he’d discarded last night on the floor. “Here, pass her over.”

I snuggled down in bed, watching him carry our child toward the door into Maia’s room, part pleased and part ashamed that I hadn’t shared with him my worries about Morgana’s daughter.

*

With the followingyear came the Irish into Gwent and along the south coast toward Dyfed. In a wet spring, Arthur marched away north in the direction of Caer Gloui, to take the road west from there into what I still couldn’t help but think of as South Wales. Ironic, as Wales was the rather cheeky name the Saxons would give that country long into the future– meaning it was the country of the “wealas”– the foreigners. And by that they’d mean the native Britons.

Merlin, left behind at Din Cadan, gave me a short history lesson and together we constructed a map of Wales as best we could, marking on the kingdoms where he thought they lay in relation to one another. This proved a harder task than I’d imagined, especially as I didn’t have the luxury of a pencil and eraser.

“In the north, Gwynedd for sure,” Merlin said, waving a vague hand over the quite detailed outline of Wales I’d drawn. “By the western sea. And Cadwy’s Powys of course, to the east of Gwynnedd. A bit lower down. Owain White Tooth holds Gwynedd. Never trust a man who smiles as much as he does.”

My pen hovered over the map.

Merlin leaned forward. “And this must be Ynys Mon, I think… the old Isle of the Druids. Of course, they’re long gone now.” The Isle of Anglesey on the northwest tip of Wales.

I raised my eyebrows. “Still known as the Isle of the Druids even now? I know the Romans had a big problem with the druids and attacked Ynys Mon– but that was hundreds of years ago.”

He shrugged. “There might still be one or two there, I suppose. In hiding. I’d heard they died out years ago. No need for them now Britain’s Christian… allegedly.”

I smiled at his reference to Christianity in Britain. On the surface it was as he said– Christian. But scratch that surface and the more ancient beliefs would be revealed: the corn dollies, the festivals like Beltane and Samhain, the ancestor worship… the taking of heads in battle.

I wrote the nameYnys Monon the map in small capital letters, then sighed. “Well, I can put Viroconium on, for sure.” I drew a small circle and inked it in, then wrote Viroconium beside it. “And Caer Legeion, and Caer Went, in Gwent.” I added those two southern towns which I’d visited on numerous occasions with my father, thanking him mentally for my thorough education in things even he had never known would come in so useful.

“Moridunum in the west,” I said with undisguised glee, and marked in Carmarthen, another place I’d been to. “Um, you weren’t born there by any chance, were you?”

We were standing at the table in my chamber, the children playing on the floor around our feet. Merlin looked up at me, face puzzled, and shook his head.

I smiled. “Just that in my world it’s called Carmarthen, and a legend says it’s called that after you– because you were born there. Caer-myrddin. Merlin’s town.”

He chuckled. “That’s funny. No, I wasn’t born there.”

My curiosity rose. “Where were you born, then? Where are you from?”

He shrugged. “I’m from… nowhere.”

I set down my pen, careful not to make an ineradicable blot that only scraping with a sharp blade would remove. It was made of a long wooden cylinder with a curl of metal round it that acted like a cartridge, making a receptacle for the ink. Using it was a hard to acquire knack, and I still found it difficult not to produce the sort of blotchy writing a drunken spider with a nervous tic might make. “That’s a funny thing to say. You must be from somewhere. What about your parents? Do you know where they were from?”

The sudden urge to make him reveal more of his past swept over me– curiosity and plain nosiness, I suppose. I was a woman, after all. I smiled at him winningly. At least, I thought I did.

“I don’t know where my parents were from,” he said, with a wry smile. “Nor who they were. And I don’t come from anywhere because the people who brought me up were wanderers.”

My eyebrows must have shot up. “They weren’t your parents, then? The people who raised you?”

He shook his head. “No. They weren’t.” His suddenly abrupt tone told me he wanted to drop the matter, so I turned back to the map, even though I itched to keep him talking. No wonder Guorthegirn’s advisers had seized upon him for their sacrifice as the “boy with no father.” I’d have to worm it out of him another time, when he was in a more forthcoming mood.

Merlin prodded the westernmost limit of South Wales in what would one day become Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. “Dyfed, that’s an Irish kingdom. They’ve been here generations now, and cause no trouble. The king styles himself with a Roman name and title– Agricola the Protector– and thinks of himself as British. You’ll have seen him at the Council of Kings. A tall man with silver in his red hair. They say the Irish tend to be ginger– like Cei.”

He laughed. “For all we know Cei’s father Gorlois had Irish blood, coming from Cornubia as he did. He was a redhead as well. They say men with that coloring make good warriors. The Irish have ever raided and raped all along our western coastlines, so there’s likely to be a lot of Irish blood in the men of the west.”

I tentatively marked in Dyfed in capital letters across the area he indicated.

“Then north of that is Ceredigion– the king there is descended from Cunedda in direct line. A hundred years ago, when the old king came down from Guotodin, beyond the Wall, to fight the Irish in Gwynedd, he brought all his many sons with him. His great grandson Ceretic rules there now, but he’s getting old.”